AUGUST LOOLAM

Character TD

Rigging

The bikers have a standard biped rig with combination blendshape and bone driven face controls. The bikers share a skeleton and facial controls, the rig has a character selection dropdown menu to switch between them, as well as a helmet on/off switch.

The heads of the bikers also have a resolution switch.

Bikers

For my Animation Production class we had 12 weeks to make a short film. I had the idea of two bikers racing along a track.

After I had an idea of what I wanted the bikers to be I modeled them and then began to rig them.

I created bones around the face and then used those bones to create blendshapes.

Scratch

Scratch was commissioned by a friend of mine, he created the concept sketch and tasked me with figuring out how to make the character work in 3D.

Scratch is a paper ball, to emulate this in Maya I simulated a plane falling into a depression. Once we settled on one we liked I sculped out a mouth and modeled the limbs.

To preserve the effect of the charatcer being made of paper I created a series of small joints for the limbs and bound them to a spline curve rather than a ikRPsolver.

The eyes are meant to be a computer screen to create this effect I created a layered texture with layers for each eye and their eyelids respectively. The eye layers consist of a single radial ramp. They are driven by their UV position data which is plugged into a curve to allow the UV coodinates to be animated and keyed. while the ramp positon data is used to control dialation.

The ramps are then linked to a lambert that can then send color data to a custom attibute on the rig to change the eye colors. The pixel effect is created with a standard maya grid texture on the layered texture node.

Cubey

Cubey is an old concept of mine dating back to early 2012 that I have recently reinterpreted and redeisgned.

The legs employ the use of IKSpring solvers. The eyes however use an animated texture system I developed for this model.

Dweeb

Dweeb is a character from a short film my rigging professor worked on. He gave us the mesh and assigned us the task of rigging it.

I created an expression map that displaced the UV data of the fron face of the head to create eye expressions.

The ALSER

During my time working on Aperture Tag, I was tasked with desigining, modeling and animating a power generator device for a room in the game.

Nano

Nano is an older character of mine that I designed for the Source video game engine. Since source is an older game engine. To be able to control an animate the thrusters on nano I created a series of flex rigs and engine specific preset files.